Innovations Spotlight

Cleveland Clinic: Long Live Rock 'n' Roll

Popular music, like healthcare, thrives on innovation. Ever since a local disc jockey coined the term “rock ‘n’ roll” Cleveland, Ohio has had a close association with rock music and its most innovative performers. In the 1950s and 60s, then little-known artists like Elvis Presley and Neil Young played in small clubs and theaters a few blocks from Cleveland Clinic, a medical center that was then rocking the world with innovations like coronary angiography, improved dialysis techniques, and artificial organ research.

Dr. Kurt Spindler Takes on a New Frontier Where Outcomes are King

Just like a baseball player makes a living from batting averages and RBIs, doctors will soon make a living from the positive progress of his or her patient. For many, this is a startlingly obvious assertion. Almost every employee in private industry is paid based on performance. Yet a vast majority of doctors and practices are paid by the quantity of patient visits, regardless of what that visit yields. In other words, doctors are paid by the pitch; where the ball goes after contact is financially irrelevant.

Steve Huang Sheds New Light on the Nuclear Medicine Industry

What do you think of when you hear the words “Nuclear Medicine”? To anyone not familiar with the field, the terms likely conjures up words like complicated, expensive, or commercially prohibitive. While it’s true that nuclear medicine is complex, Cleveland Clinic’s Steve Shih-Lin Huang, MD, PhD is demonstrating that there are completely safe, impactful, and market-ready benefits in this renewed field, in particular for prostate cancer patients.

Fearless Innovation: The story of John Bona and AppointmentPass

Mission Control: How Dr. Marc Petre is Launching the Clinic to a New Frontier of Care

The mission control center has been a staple of space launches from the very beginning. You’ve seen it in the movies: engineers are glued to individual screens and dashboards monitoring very specific functions, while the main feed shows the ignition, the liftoff, the separation, and the entry into space. It’s not hard to see why it makes sense to have all of these screens and people in one room coordinating with key members of the team in the field. Engineers can see what’s happening, they can communicate with each other, and work together to troubleshoot if a problem occurs. More simply, space agencies know that when everyone is on the same mission, it tends to translate to successful outcomes.

CCI Honors Inventors at the Annual Innovators Awards Reception

On May 11, Cleveland Clinic Innovations hosted the Innovators Awards Reception to recognize and celebrate the active Cleveland Clinic inventors and successes from the past year. The event, which took place on the Miller Rooftop Pavilion, was held in conjunction with National Inventors Month.

CCI Celebrates National Inventors' Month

It’s easy to take everyday objects for granted. Things like your desk lamp, your television, an airplane and even your smart phone alter our lives almost every minute of the day. Not to mention the things that save lives, like vaccinations, MRIs and pacemakers. But behind every little object, machine, and medicine that you encounter, an inventor was behind it. An inventor who couldn’t sleep. An inventor that took a risk. An inventor that wouldn’t quit until their contraption was just right.

Jill Byrne, RN, MSN, Brings New Meaning to Chilling Out

Caregivers everywhere can recount stories of the overly intense atmosphere of an operating room during surgery. Most of the time, they’ll tell you it has everything to do with the incredible focus and precision of surgeons to keep the patient out of harm’s way. But Jill Byrne, RN, MSN, knows there’s a bit more to it than this.

Josh Polster, MD: There's Nothing a Little Innovation Can't Solve

Voice recognition. Biopsy needles. CT Scan algorithms. Golf clubs. Beard clippings bib… Dr. Josh Polster’s got ideas. A radiologist at Cleveland Clinic since 2004, Polster sees no end to the pipeline of ideas that pop into his mind. And these aren’t back-of-the-napkin inventions either. Polster has a knack for putting deep thought into his innovations, sketching out concepts and taking detailed notes in his various lab books. Combine this work ethic with the commercialization expertise he’s gained by working closely with Cleveland Clinic Innovations over the years - and the fact that he has a long career ahead of him, receiving CCI’s Young Innovator Award in 2012 - and you have a recipe for innovation success.

Getting to Know Cleveland Clinic Innovations: Sarah Stamp

If you had asked Sarah Stamp five years ago what it takes to bring Cleveland Clinic derived delivery solutions to the market, she would have been stumped. To be fair, bringing things like hospital programs, playbooks, and educational materials to the marketplace was never really conceived of in the healthcare arena. But healthcare's current transformation is compelling hospitals to blaze new trails and share a little know-how along the way. Blazing new trails, it turns out, is exactly what Sarah knows how to do.